Developer Toolchest - Spring.NET

A listing and discussion of various tools for .NET development

CVS

Ahh, if only CVS was integrated into VS.NET out of the box. Well here are some various options to consider.

OpenSource

Commercial
- PushOk VS.NET plugin

There is a minimal C# plugin if you are using eclipse. Useful just to get the syntax highlighting for the occasional glance of a C# file inside eclipse. Plugin

For write access to sourceforge you need to use SSH. The Putty suite of tools, in particular plink.exe and pageant.exe help make this an easy affair.

Sourceforge CVS/SSH documentation

Reflector

Reflector is a reflection based class browser. It decompiles into C#/VS and has an intuitive user interface that makes it easy to navigate around the assemblies. Check it out. A VS.NET add-in is also available. If ya wanna know what the .NET class libraries are doing...look no futher.

QuickCode

QuickCode lets you type some short phrases into the VS.NET editor and have them expanded, for example typing

prop int test

and hitting Alt+Q transforms it into

private int test;

// <summary>
// Property Test (int)
// </summary>
public int Test
{
  get
  {
    return this.test;
  }
  set
  {
    this.test = value;
  }
}

NAnt

NAnt is the .NET port of the popular Ant build tool for Java projects. Version 0.8.4 is used to build Spring.NET. After installation, make the following change in NAnt.exe.config from

<platform name="win32" default="net-1.0">

to

<platform name="win32" default="net-1.1">

There's also a NAnt Addin for VS2005 available in the attachments tab. The original sources were taken from http://sourceforge.net/projects/nantaddinbut this is an improved version.

GhostDoc

[GhostDoc] is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.